[legion]

I'm just a year or two old enough to be a Gen Xer and not a millennial. (My little sister is a millennial but claims not to be one.) Growing up in Naperville in the 90's I first witnessed this. In seventh grade there was a girl on my street that us neighborhood kids never saw. I finally figured out she was taking dance lessons, and private saxophone lessons, and swimming lessons...she was scheduled every waking non-school hour of every day. We thought it was strange.

As I got into high school, I came to realize all the kids in honors classes were this way. They were all competing with each other for valedictorian. They were all trying to get into Ivy League and other elite schools and felt they needed huge resumes filled with tons of stuff. I remember a girl in one of my classes who was on crying uncontrollably for a week (and probably on the verge of suicide) when she didn't get into Notre Dame.

Some of them ended up slumming it and going to the same state school as me. I can't tell you how many of these kids ended up freaking out in college. They couldn't handle so much unstructured time.

My first roommate (with whom I was best friends in high school and had no idea he was this way) spent 3 hours every night on the phone with his mom (before cell phones) dissecting the past day and planning his next day. We ended up in a fist fight more or less because I refused to allow him (really, his mom) to plan my life as well. He moved out and I never spoke to him again.

I knew of several from my high school who dropped out in the first year because college (at the time) wasn't as easy as high school, they didn't know what to do with themselves and the anxiety got to them, or they found drugs/alcohol and self-medicated and/or went wild with their newfound freedom.

In my first month of college, I broke up with my high school girlfriend, my roommate and best friend moved out, and I got into a huge fight with my parents. I had the epiphany that no one was going to feel sorry for me or save me if I failed, so I knuckled down and decided to "get back" at all of those who wronged me by succeeding. I feel that many of my classmates had no preparation for making their own decisions or deciding on things for themselves.

And it's gotten much worse. College is no as easy as high school was in my day. It's no coincidence that colleges spend lavishly on lavish dormitories and students need safe spaces to get through the day: they've never been taught an ounce of self-reliance.